In article <4a3el9$qnc at dragonfly.wri.com>, sinan at u.washington.edu (Sinan
Karasu) wrote:
> In article <49dp82$8a6 at dragonfly.wri.com>,
> Gerhard Braunshausen <braunshausen at embl-heidelberg.de> wrote:
> >Could anyone offer an explanation for the vast differences
> >in speed particularly in comparing the PowerMac 9500 series
> >with the SparcStation 20 series?
> >
> >To my knowledge, the Sparcstations were supposed to be very
> >powerful numbercrunchers. So why do they perform so poorly
> >with Mathematica?
> >
> >Thanks for any hints
>
> I tried Mathematica on an UltraSparc, the results were very good.
> They were somewhat better than PowerMac 9500.
> I suspect that Mathematica memory management is written for Mac.
> I also suspect that Wolfram Research uses gcc as the compiler
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
For PowerMac they use the IBM xlc to compile the MMA kernel. I'm not sure
what they use for the front end (CodeWarrior?). The MMA speeds on the
PowerMac are so good because of the excellence of xlc.